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If you talk with peo­ple wor­ried about the evo­lu­tion of tech­nol­o­gy one of the things they often com­ment about is that in many cas­es the future is quite clear. You can see it com­ing, but you don’t know how far away it is.

For a long time I think we real­ly thought of him as sort of the Gandalf in the fam­i­ly. We had real­ly very lit­tle idea what he actu­al­ly did, but he was radi­at­ing kind of a qui­et, will­ful integri­ty which I think real­ly was the foun­da­tion of much of what hap­pened in his kind of shep­herd­ing of many of these process­es.

When I first start­ed on the Internet in 1972, I joined Doug Engelbart’s group, Augmentation Research Center, and I didn’t know exact­ly what a net­work infor­ma­tion cen­ter was but I thought we were going to be han­dling infor­ma­tion in a very dif­fer­ent way, and it was very addic­tive.

We’ve already been through sev­er­al sit­u­a­tions where new tech­nolo­gies come along. The Industrial Revolution removed a large num­ber of jobs that had been done by hand, replaced them with machines. But the machines had to be built, the machines had to be oper­at­ed, the machines had to be main­tained. And the same is true in this online envi­ron­ment.